--Paul and Linda McCartney, 1996
(Just for starters, that's a picture of live and dead baby male chicks who were thrown out from the chicken processing plant.)
I randomly followed one of Andrew Sullivan's links today to some award-winning cartoon movie called the "Meatrix" which laid out the framework for agri-business and the meat processing industry. As usual, I sort of rolled my eyes and immediately shut down any and all receptors as soon as the phrase "Greedy Agriculture Corporations" was uttered. (I have the same reaction to people using the words revolution, abortionist, sodomite, fascist, Islamofascist, stay the course, Rush Limbaugh, Moby, the "system", PETA, Greenpeace, John Kerry, neo-con, Che Guevara, Lenin, Marx, Federalist, Rawjer Sakker (that's for your mother), vegan, corporate profits, Lindsay Lohan, Steve Forbes, queer, unamerican, AZN, the WTO, no blood for oil...shall I continue?) But I kept on it because...hey, it was a cartoon...and the Morpheus figure was a cow named Moo-pheus. Yes. This is Moopheus.
Anyhow, after having my interest in factory farms piqued, I decided to just go trolling on the internet for gruesome images of factory farms. We're so oversaturated hearing irritating environmental activists trumpeting animal rights and moral equivalence between animals and humans and the evil corporate regime that we associate their idiocy and annoying behavior with their cause...thereby ignoring everything they say because they have curly, unwashed hair, a dirty bandana, and reek of marijuana and B.O. That's not fair guys!
Ok. So she's not quite a dirty hippie. And uh. Yes, she is hot and naked. (and as it turns out, it seems like every single PETA protest involves nudity.) I'm totally not kidding.
Anyway, the real point of this post is that I wanted to actually see some of the corporate agriculture and meat plants for myself without the hippie intermediary. The "Factory Farms" as they're called. And so...International Trade Law went out the window, and in came socially conscious time-wasting.
And I was actually a little bothered by what I saw. Not because I wasn't aware of the meat industry or the implications of slaughter (having read Fast Food Nation and worked on a meat farm in Switzerland briefly)...but I felt something a little more visceral and disturbed....I believe it was the machines.
It's just very strange to see cows all lined up like this, hanging upside down, having their throats slit as they bleed themselves out.
I mean...cows are really big animals. Like mini-dinosaur big. You know how we have this scale of what we're willing to step on? Small ants? No Problem. Bigger ants? No problem. Small cockroaches...a little more wary. Huge cockroaches....a lot more freaked out. And by the time you get to like, something with bones like a baby rat or a baby frog...you're just NOT gonna step on it. So what happens when you get to cow? You close your eyes and let the Mexican do it. And then you have these huge cows up here, and they just slit their throats and rip them to pieces without any real concern for any other considerations.
I think it's just a little difficult for me to deal with the sheer volume and brutality of the whole process. Assuming a large number of the cows don't get properly stunned, as I'm sure they don't...(This is the stunning process below)
We're just talking massive numbers of animals being ripped to pieces while fully conscious in the most brutal ways. (by the way that blood in the picture is messed up) And, of course, I found my way through interviews with workers who have done this so much that they really can't find any "life" left in the animals, so they basically "play" with them by mutilation and pushing the limits of what they can get the animals to do.
In any case, there was no real moral to the story. I don't care if you eat meat, and I'm not entirely sure whether or not this will have any effect on whether I eat meat. The brutality we witness in the slaughterhouses is no less brutal than what people somehow are still doing to each other every single day, so if I get a steak out of it...maybe I'll decide that it's worth it. I dunno. I have no fucking clue. I love my meat. But something is wrong, whether or not I do anything about it. It is hard, though, to match those images up to this wonderful looking steak. Is this what commodification means? When we can no longer recognize muscle and a sliced bone, and instead just see "steak"?
In any case, the real point is just to post a few things that I saw today that were new to me...and hopefully new to you...just to lend some perspective. (and ultimately make like you just like me.) Hopefully I'll share a steak with you soon.
And how did I have the time to do this during exams? I didn't. I'm a moron. I'm fucked.
4 comments:
you know, the arguments for free-range, or organic, or (the absolute best, in my opinion) just plain local meat/veggies/etc are not all hippie-ish ones. i've been trying to buy local for carbon reasons too, and the fact that it's much easier to do in new york (the major grocery stores carry a local farm version of nearly everything). having grown up around farms and seen cows, chickens, and pigs all get slaughtered (and then eating them), the violence doesn't get to me. americans just never seem to want to know where their food comes from, but i really prefer it. i think i'd like to see whatever i'm eating get killed--just so i know i didn't participate in something i didn't agree with. anyway, i am rambling. haha, and i'm making pork barbeque tomorrow to show these yankees a thing or two.
Ooh, read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I read it this summer before going to the D-land and it's quite wonderful both in terms of writing style and content. I thought it might just be another version of Fast Food Nation when I picked it up, but it was much more. There's a very interesting part about an uber-organic farm in VA where the only thing the farmer has to purchase is chicken feed--everything else is taken care of through conscientious management of resources (chicken shit fertilizes grass, cows eat grass, etc). Very very good and I think the NYT just voted it one of the top 10 books of 2006. The best part, however, is about the corn industry--wow. The corn industry is freakin crazy. You really have to read it.
-M.
M. - haha yeah. I've been waiting to read the Omnivore's Dilemma for a few months now, but I haven't had the time to read a book because I'm so busy watching television. Maybe over break. How was the GRE? (Don't have to respond here)
As for the violence, I'm still not sure it's the violence or killing that bothers me. I know particularly when I'm abroad and I see them breaking necks, slitting throats, and slaughtering the animals...I'm not bothered by it. I think it's the mechanization that bothers me more...entire rooms full of bloody cow heads on meathooks and the like...the sort of industrial whirring sounds that probably accompany the process. I'm not sure sure why that bothers me exactly...but I think that's it.
It appears that the hot PETA chix's photo no longer appears on your site. Alas, I pay a brief visit to take a break from a deposition summary (the most boring thing ever), only to find no hot chix. You should hang your head in shame.
SJ
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